Interactive Circle

I watch a lot of television. I came to this highly unexpected place through my own choices, somehow, from the single young flight attendant who actively followed the arts and cultural scenes of San Francisco and New York and kept her parents' cast off television in her bedroom closet, pulling it out mostly for Big Games or election debates and returns. The transition was complicated but certainly complete. I went from philosophically opposed to fully engaged somewhere between 30 and 50. We've grown up together, television and I, from a few black and white choices back in test pattern days that I'm old enough to remember, to thousands of choices, DVR programming from my iPhone, picture in a picture if the need arises (usually for sports or politics), always tweeting while watching, an interactive television experience.
Our children, and presumably our grandchildren, help keep us young, and most of us will overcome any obstacles to remain in communication with them, so even the most hesitant, resistant and downright unwilling among us will adopt our children's media if that's what we have to do to stay connected. But that's not me. I was an early adopter. After living my life deeply immersed in one form of marketing or another (the daughter, step-daughter, neice, sister and wife of marketing executives on both the agency and client sides), I was blessed to be part of a team that pioneered using offline promotion to drive online interaction. In fact, we were the first people on the planet to do so, and helped the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office define how interactivity is novel and non-obvious, but I digress. I was regularly communicating with my kids via AIM in the late '90s, early '00s, and by '99 had been cyberquatted, in itself a new media lesson. Since then I've intentionally grabbed each new kind of interactivity as it came along, determined not to be left behind (again), equating it with professional vulnerability, viscerally excited about the new potential in each and every one.
So now, television is the old guy (we like to call ourselves middle aged, but is that really what it is?) and it's got this hot young sweetheart, the internet. Suddenly, I don't just watch television, but I watch it with a crowd of others assembled on one social media platform or another. Lets face it, we seniors don't get out like we used to. I work 45 hours a week in a complicated, hectic, adrenaline-drenched environment, and I have Crohn's, so watching television flat on my back with my laptop is about all I have energy for at the end of my work day. My kids are grown and have homes of their own. I'm tired, but also not as busy as I was used to being. I've always been very social, so I welcome the chance to talk about what I'm watching, even if it's just 140 characters at a time on Twitter or with folks I know on Facebook.
When I hear my contemporaries dismiss social media, primarily as a "time suck", I hear an old fogy shouting "Get off of my lawn!" Refusing to learn for no good reason smells of fear, smells of failure to grow, and rationalizing it as somehow right to think that way smells of self-deception. Twitter gets called "narcissistic" more than other platforms, and it's a common whine, "Why would anyone want to know what you're doing/eating/seeing/etc.?" Except that's the point when "etc." includes thinking and you use Twitter not just to follow people but to follow ideas, subjects of interest, current events, other media, even television. In most areas of our lives we are bound with others by the things we have in common: our geography, our social stations, our ages, our activities or those of our children; but in each of these there are clear signals that create preconception: how we look, where we live, what we wear, what we drive. It's different when we interact on social media because there we choose connections largely, if not entirely, because of shared ideas; and on Twitter, unlike some other fora, we can follow the ideas first as a path to find the people with whom we wish to connect.

This started as a post about the awkwardness of the interaction between television and social media, at least from television's perspective, but has veered into one about how television is enhanced, made fresh, by the internet. Maybe it won't be long before interactive television becomes routine, but, at least for now, it remains a one-way medium. We watch it, but it doesn't really know we were there. However, in tandem with social media it becomes a part of a greater interactive whole, and life becomes less lonely when we watch while "talking" by typing about what we're watching on Twitter and Facebook with others who are watching it too.
As I was editing this post, I watched Leslie Stahl's 60 Minutes interview with Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, while following all tweets that contained the word "facebook" on Twitter. I also DVRed it because the Falcons game ran late and I didn't want to miss it, so I have it stored in my TV's memory. The segment closed with the announcement of yet another Facebook redesign deployment tomorrow and invited viewers to visit the show's website for a tour of the new interface. Gotta run (in this beautiful interactive circle) y'all. It's a great time to be alive.

Catfish

Warning: This post may contain vague spoilers, but does not contain concrete ones. I don't come out and say it, but it's impossible to write about Catfish without at least alluding to the story's secret. Read at your risk. Even better, go see the movie, then come back and read.
I lucked into a special showing of Catfish, with co-director Henry Joost in attendance, making it two movies in a row I've seen that were followed by Q&A with the film's maker, since the last movie I went to was The Big Uneasy in New Orleans on 8/30 with Harry Shearer. I intentionally didn't read much about Catfish, because I didn't want to know the secret, and I went early in its release, the second day, because I knew I couldn't stop myself from finding out for long. I also wanted to see "Catfish" before seeing The Social Network, wanting to see the story built on Facebook before seeing the story of how Facebook was built. It was an afternoon showing on a sunny Saturday, so the crowd was small, and I sat down front and right, so it just happened that he was five or six feet from me when answering questions. Even better, he spent time in the lobby signing autographs and talking to folks after the show, and really seemed to be a great guy. Pictured with me at right, he looks remarkably like The Youngest (much less so IRL).
The film follows Nev (rhymes with Steve) Schulman, a photographer and the brother of Joost's business partner, Ariel, with whom he runs a film production company in New York City. The three shared an office space. In this highly recommended recent piece, Joost describes it simply:

Our threshold for considering something interesting enough to film is very, very low.... When Nev started to correspond with an 8-year-old kid who reached out to him on the internet, Ariel pulled out his camera instinctively.... We film ourselves all the time.

Their resulting work follows Nev's evolving relationship with that kid and her family, immediate and extended. The virally popular trailer calls what happens when they head out on a road trip to meet these people "shattering", but I don't agree and think that's even misleading. I found the surprise liberating and sweet, maybe even the opposite of the scary it's been depicted. It's more like discovering Picasso's "lie that tells the truth," defining art and the creative spirit, even if some of that spirit, that art, is accidental, even if someone could get hurt. I was wondering if it was true, and some in the media have suggested it's a faux documentary, a story built to look like the truth, a device. "Is it true?" was one of the first questions asked of Joost during the Q & A that followed the film, and Joost didn't just answer, "Yes." Much, if not most, of the discussion that followed was less about the movie and more about the experience that these young men shared, more importantly, the remarkable people they met. They saw something unfolding in front of them and documented it without knowing where it would go, almost stumbling into a deeply moving story and one that also speaks to a core value of social media: its ability to relieve the loneliness and isolation that so often burden ordinary people, perhaps especially those overwhelmed by loss, difficulty, routine, emptiness, pain, its ability to help us hold onto "fragments of things we used to be, wanted to be, never could be," as he put it. BTDT.
Ultimately, the film's creators find the eruptive, disruptive, irrepressible nature of the artistic soul, affirming the notion that the thing you can't not do, that thing that comes out anyway, even when you or the circumstances of your life try to keep it in, will find a way even if it's sideways, even when our burdens bend us, bend it. These young men, perhaps overly eager, some have suggested self-absorbed, turned out to be as gentle and generous souls as the ones they discovered. Instead of judging, they embraced. "Catfish" isn't scary or shattering; it's tender and enlightening. As Joost put it, "The biggest surprise in living the experience and making the film was that we didn't find a villain on the other side of that door." I'm so glad I saw "Catfish" and got the chance to talk with Henry Joost. It's one of those movies you keep thinking about long after it's over. If it's not playing where you are, click here and request the movie in your area.
The current crop of documentaries really is seriously enticing. I'd also like to see "Waiting for Superman" and "I'm Still Here". I loved "Catfish" but warn you not to expect some huge stunner of a reveal, because it's a more ordinary but elegant story they unfold. Next weekend I'm going to go for the big studio fiction based on real life, the movie about Facebook, "The Social Network". I'll try not to expect Aaron Sorkin to be there.